Feb 20, 2010

No Human Theme In Ubuntu 10.04?

In an interview recorded on February 19 2010, Mark Shuttleworth revealed that a new light theme will replace the Human theme in Ubuntu 10.04. The Human theme has been the default theme in Ubuntu since the first release.

In the interview Mark says:

...we'll have some new styling which is going to be the starting point of another five year view. We've been Human for the last five years and now we're gonna be light oriented.

I'm sure Mark is referring to something like the Elementary theme, which has been a hot topic these last few months.
Some people think that interpreting "some new styling" being "the starting point of another five year view" as an entire new GTK / Metacity theme redesign might be a bit of a stretch. As 23meg from the Ubuntuforums.org points out, it can be interpreted as only the starting pieces of a new five-year outlook landing in Lucid as well.
During the Ask Mark session at Ubuntu OpenWeek, Mark was asked about the artwork for Lucid. Back then he replied:

New window decorations, some new icons for the panel indicators, some new styling on boot and login, no new gtk theme.

I have to agree with Sashin. Elementary tastes too much like Apple, and that's despicable for Ubuntu would lack personality. Conversely, while being simlpe, Night Impression is also awesome, it matches perfectly the style of Startup (Grub loading) and Notifications, and would finally project Ubuntu style in the modern world with the slickest of looks! Wow, I really hope they'll pick this one!

It's important to remember that Human hasn't really stayed the same over the 5 years.

It started off as a very brown Human (Legacy Human), and then became "caramel coloured" in 2006 (Ubuntulooks Human - still my favourite) and then more recently it's become Murrine Human and eventually turned full circle back toward the brown.

I hope it'll be the OMG!! theme - very light, beautiful golden orange.

Elementary is great, but it ends up going grey very quickly. Chocolate brown speaks a lot louder about Africa than Grey will ever do. It's a big mistake to throw away the brown palette. You end up looking like Apple and then why not some Blue? See the problem?